Thoughts on travel and finding oneself
I have been thinking again about travels and pilgrimages and changes. And how things don’t really change even when you hope they would.
Recently I found a journal from a long trip I took in around 1978-1979, living in Japan and Taiwan for a year and a half or so. I was much younger then yet when I read it I recognize themes that I still have all these years later. Things which pass through my thoughts, some to stay and dwell, others to be fleeting thoughts gone in the blink of an eye. Even then I wrote about living elsewhere (here I was in what some might have thought an enviable position of flitting from Asian country to country living as I could by teaching English, and yet I was thinking about how much I wanted to revisit and live in Europe, Paris specifically). I was feeling bored and lazy and not particularly happy some days and yet other days wrote about wondrous adventures that now nearly 30 years later I can barely remember. I was unhappy about people, family, love, my life, who I was, where I was going… and yet living out “my dream”, always wanting more. Now, where am I that is so different? True older and wiser in some ways but mainly just older.
I think about this as I start to plan for a summer in Italy – a month long program in Florence. I am fortunate in that I can go to things like this and return with salary-step credits and a tax-write-off trip but still, why am I really going? What is it about travel that I both hate and love and keep needing to do?
I write this to myself not expecting any great revelations but to remind myself that all these years later I take steps to find myself in foreign lands (my own personal pilgrimage in a sense) and then what do I find? Do I like who I find? Do I really need to go somewhere to find what it is I seek?
“It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end.”
--Ursula K. LeGuin
posted by Rhonda Halushka @ 8:04 AM
3 comments
The 
3 Comments:
Isn't it great to pick up a journal you kept years ago? You can flip open the pages and say,
" Who ARE you? "
I have about 6 binders full of Journal Work and now I have to wonder, do I want anyone else to see these?
Just Wondering because this entry made me think...great work!
Anita Marie
It never ceases to amaze me, when I look at old journal, how much grumbling I did on the pages. Those journals saved me during a very difficult time and enabled me to escape and not feel so trapped.
We travelled throughout Europe, Norway, Sweden and Denmark for six months and by the end of three months I was unbelievably homesick. I was not missing anyone in particular - just my place in the universe - which is here in Melbourne.
Luckily we fought off the desire to come home early and it was an amazing journey but I have never felt quite the same about travelling again and have learned to escape on the wings of imagination to cyber worlds.
Yeah, who are we? The million dollar question. I think we are changing all the time, and yet always the same in part. Maybe this comforts us? Maybe too much would be too radical? Not sure. I have grumbled a lot in journals too, and it helps a lot. Is it something to do with out notion of Paradise Lost? I am clueless about this, really. Asking the same questions;-)
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